No, Fascism Can’t Happen Here

Could it ever happen here? Fascism, that is. That question is a standard refrain from American history, dating back at least to the 1930s and also related to the classic Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here. It was asked with increasing frequency after the ascent and election of Donald Trump, both on the left and by “Never Trump” commentators on the right, and has continued to be raised as Trump has governed.

But I would like to hazard a prediction that no, it cannot happen here. I won’t claim it could never happen over the centuries, rather that it can’t happen in anything recognizably like the America of today.

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My argument is pretty simple: American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy. It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter other radical groups, to seize control of. No matter who is elected, the fascists cannot control the bureaucracy, they cannot control all the branches of American government, they cannot control the judiciary, they cannot control semi-independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and they cannot control what is sometimes called “the deep state.” The net result is they simply can’t control enough of the modern state to steer it in a fascist direction.

This yields a new defense of Big Government, which is harder to take over, and harder to “turn bad,” than many a smaller government. Surely it ought to give us pause that the major instances of Western fascism came right after a time when government was relatively small, and not too long after the heyday of classical liberalism in Europe, namely the late 19th century. No, I am not blaming classical liberalism for Nazism, but it is simply a fact that it is easier to take over a smaller and simpler state than it is to commandeer one of today’s sprawling bureaucracies.

I commonly hear arguments from classical liberals suggesting that a “night watchman state” (or some slightly expanded version thereof) focused narrowly on upholding the rule of law provides government with greater efficacy and focus. If government is concentrating on its essential functions, and what it can do well, maybe it does a better job. Imagine, for instance, a government that doesn’t try so hard to regulate broccoli stems, but delivers on limiting crime and providing speedy and fair trials to the accused.

Yet the greater focus of the night watchman state, for all its virtues, is part of the reason why it is easy to take over. There is a clearly defined center of power and a clearly defined set of lines of authority; furthermore, the main activity of the state is to enforce property rights through violence or the threat of violence. That means such a state will predominantly comprise policemen, soldiers, possibly border authorities, Coast Guard employees and others in related support services. The culture and ethos of such a state is likely to be relatively masculine and also relatively martial and tolerant of a certain amount of risk, and indeed violence. The state will be full of people who are used to the idea of applying force to achieve social ends, even if, under night watchman assumptions, those deployments of force are for the most part justified.

A would-be fascist basically has to court those groups and promise them a new social order in which violence is raised in social status, and in which violence is deployed for something other than just the protection of property rights. I’m not suggesting that is an easy sell, and indeed most societies do not fall prey to fascist temptations, nor do their soldiers lean in that direction. I’m merely suggesting that as intellectual leaps go, that is an imaginable one. I believe that even in today’s American state there is more support among policemen, border guards and soldiers for some semifascistic ideas than there is, say, in the regular bureaucracy. The conversion exercise becomes all the easier if there is a communist threat on the horizon, and fascism can be sold to the populace and to the members of the state as superior to the nationalization of property and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Fascism, at least in some of its forms, sounds closer to the status quo and thus less scary to many conservatives, moderates and members of the middle class, as indeed was the case for part of the 1930s in many locales, not just in Nazi Germany.

Compare that struggle to trying to persuade a complex social welfare bureaucracy to adopt fascism. The social welfare bureaucracy will be more scattered, have a larger number of people and probably a greater diversity of types, and it is likely to employ a much higher percentage of women and also relatively old people—men and women at ages who likely would be out of the armed forces and possibly out of police forces as well. The bulk of that bureaucracy will have had no experience with violence, either directly or indirectly, and it probably dreads the notion of a country in which violence is more prevalent. They are not used to thinking of criminals or foreign forces as an enemy in any kind of active, daily way, again unlike the police forces and soldiers. In short, as an audience, they are far less likely to embrace or even tolerate ideals of fascism.

You already may know that about 4.3 percent of the population of Washington, D.C., voted for Trump. Personally, I do not consider Trump to be an appropriate stand-in for the concept of fascism, but the point is that a lot of these people did make that association, to varying degrees, and they voted accordingly.

And since being elected, Trump has found that the traditional bureaucracy has been trying to thwart his will. The courts have ruled against his executive orders; a Republican Congress has not been a rubber stamp for his ideas on trade, immigration and health care reform; and agencies have been slow-walking the Trumpian ideas they do not like. The Pentagon and even the State Department have re-exerted their traditional control over foreign policy. The Trump ad-ministration has found it does not have the ability to staff the federal government with Trump sympathizers, so there is a mix of radical understaffing and staffing with traditional Republican types. None of those developments is conducive to radical change in government, whether or not you think the Trump agenda ever was a fascistic one. The problem with Trumpian rule has been one of chaos much more than totalitarianism.

Furthermore, the Trump associates who sometimes are considered the most fascistic largely have been forced out or lost influence, including Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon. Actual fascists these days don’t have extensive experience in government at high levels, and they are unlikely to find such environments conducive to their goals and temperaments. That makes it very hard for a potential fascistic revolution to get off the ground in America. And the larger, more diverse, and more decentralized the federal government is, the more of a “fascist shock force” would be required to bring about fundamental change. Fascistic ideas just don’t seem to be in the running to produce such kinds of change. You might think that someday American fascism will acquire a better-developed infrastructure in terms of ideas and personnel, but still a larger and more complex government raises the bar significantly on how much ideological infrastructure would be needed to effect real fascistic change.

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History offers examples to shore up this theory.

There are reasons to doubt the strict veracity of German governmental economics statistics dating back at least as far as the 1920s. Still, everything we know about that time period, including comparisons with other, economically similar countries, suggests that the overall size of government on the eve of the Nazi revolution was not massively large. For instance, German government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product measures at about 36.6 percent as of 1932, at least according to the researchers Suphan Andic and Jindrich Veverka. That is considerably smaller than what the German government would grow to after the de-Nazification following World War II, when government rose to 44 percent of GDP by 1958 and to much more later. Economists Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht offer an alternate estimate of 34.1 percent of GDP for the Nazi government in 1937, and 31.1 percent of GDP for government expenditure in Mussolini’s Italy, again for 1937. We also should adjust our interpretation of these numbers by the reality that government regulation in those days was extremely underdeveloped, making the states of that time, relative to contemporary states, smaller yet.

The history of fascism more generally has been characterized by conflict between party and state, and extreme fascist victories typically have required the ascendancy of party and thus a relatively weak state. Hitler, for instance, used a variety of persuasion, force and terror to make the state do his bidding. In these situations, party militants typically wanted to try to take over the state altogether, as Lenin (more or less) managed to do in Russia, but the more successful fascist leaders, including Hitler, resisted this tendency and accommodated their programs to the demands of the bureaucracy to a considerable extent, so as to not alienate those bureaucracies. In other words, the key parts of the German state had to be small enough, and easy enough to manage, to be taken over by a political party.

In Italy the situation was different, as, in the words of political scientist Robert O. Paxton, “the traditional state wound up with supremacy over the party,” and thus Italian fascism was more moderate and less destructive than in Germany. This difference in outcome did not spring from a larger Italian state, but arose in large part because Mussolini did not trust his own most militant forces and thus preferred for the traditional Italian state to remain largely in place.

Latin American fascists typically have sprung from weak and insecure states, often rife with corruption but not massively interventionist. Arguably the strongest and best developed fascistic state was Pinochet’s Chile, which also had an extensive (albeit imperfect) social welfare apparatus that Pinochet in fact supported and increased over time. That is perhaps one reason why Pinochet’s Chile made a relatively smooth transition out of autocracy into a stable democracy once he lost the referendum and stepped down.

It is interesting to consider contemporary China in light of this analysis, and fortunately most of the implications are positive ones. In 1993, the Chinese central government’s share of direct revenue absorbed only 3 percent of the country’s economy, which is a very low figure, reflecting the fiscal immaturity of the Chinese state. The widespread prevalence of state-owned enterprises meant the actual Chinese government was much bigger and more in influential than that single number would suggest, but still the Chinese central government proper was not so sprawling and complex. At that time, arguably there was a higher risk of an outside takeover of the Chinese government, perhaps by a dissident “fundamentalist” communist faction rather than by explicit fascists, but a takeover nonetheless. It wasn’t so hard to seize control of the centralized state, and the relevant constraints probably came from the provinces and other local authorities, raising the traditional specter of a Chinese civil war.

These days, the Chinese central government is more bureaucratized, there is a value-added tax, and the government has been evolving toward the bureaucratic structures found in the developed world, albeit with the nondemocratic backdrop of the Communist Party. Most of all, the Chinese central government is more complex, and it represents a more diverse series of interests. It is probably harder for extremists to take over such a government and plunge China back into either total tyranny or chaos. China has become more normalized, and although the associated bureaucratization of society brings some very real costs, overall that is a favorable development. China’s own historical experiences with massacres, brutal rule and oppression seem to be growing less rather than more likely.

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All of this is not to suggest that bigger government is always better. A government that is too big involves high costs in terms of efficiency and arguably justice. The former Soviet Union is one example of such a disastrous system.

Excess government may cause slow growth, and if government is far too large, it may cause a more general breakdown of social order and thus also a collapse of rule. And that actually is the most plausible path from very large government to fascism, namely through an intermediate state of political chaos, including, for a while, what is likely to be a much smaller government. If you consider the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet economic model failed, the Soviet government lost its support, the Soviet empire fell apart, revenue dried up, and there was a power vacuum throughout parts of the 1990s. The eventual result of that vacuum was Vladimir Putin and the construction of a new fascism. The point here is not whether Putin is better or worse than the old Soviet Union (I would say better, at least so far). Rather, even a highly statist system required an intermediate period of collapse and smaller government, and a partial falling away of the preexisting bureaucracy, before making a phase transition to a new fascism.

Choosing a complex governmental structure to minimize the risk of a fascist takeover also involves forgoing some potential upside from major reforms. With a larger government, the society will be more prone to ossification and stagnation, as the permanent bureaucracy will overregulate the economy and be very difficult to pare back. In many Western societies, it is very difficult to get rid of excess bureaucracy and regulation, to the detriment of dynamism and economic growth. Just as we are insulated from a fascist takeover, so are we probably stuck with some of the less efficient features of modern social democracies. For all the bipartisan agreement that regulatory reform in some manner is needed, very few Western countries have succeeded with it.

We can therefore think of the ongoing evolution and cementing of Big Government, in the social welfare and bureaucratic senses of that term, is an extended exercise in risk aversion. Since Western governments became more bureaucratic and complex, we haven’t had much in the way of fascist takeovers, or even serious attempts in those directions. We also haven’t had that much in the way of sweeping reforms in the deregulatory direction. These are two sides of the same coin, and they represent a deliberate decision to opt for, or at least to allow, a relatively stable course with a minimum of risk of excess deviation toward any particular extreme political direction.

No, it can’t happen here. Not anytime soon. Trump or no Trump. That is both our blessing and, when you think through all of its implications, our curse as well.